In the previous chapter, you were introduced to the SharePoint site and its purpose in a SharePoint portal. With this release of SharePoint 2010, one of Microsoft's goals is to bring Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to all users, rather than to a specific user group. The result is that there is a lot of functionality that was never available to users who were more familiar with network drives or e-mail exchange for collaboration. With the knowledge from this book and without the need for heavy dependence on an IT department, there is now a platform for content to be stored and managed by business users for business users when SharePoint's ECM functionality is combined with collaboration, Office integration, and social networking.
This chapter explains Lists and how to manage them to provide an efficient way to store information and thus provide ECM. We view lists as a key SharePoint functionality for providing basic and complex architecting of corporate and workgroups' information.
In this chapter you will gain knowledge of List Management and understand how to track information and collaborate with team members:
- List Management basics
- Creating lists
- Managing lists
- How to add content to a list
- Advanced list features
A SharePoint list is a collection of similar items that are defined by a set of structure columns or fields, resembling a database table. Lists support various field or data types, and can have workflow and alert triggers that react to events such as creating, updating, or deleting items. In addition, lists can be configured to filter, sort, or group items based on item data or properties, which is ideal for visualization of information to both display and edit item data.
An ideal business use for a list is to store information that is normally managed in an Excel file, such as new orders, issue tracking of bugs on a project, or maintenance contracts. The advantages of storing information in a list rather than in Excel are:
- Multiple people can edit different line items of the information
- Read, write, and view permissions can be applied to the line items
- SharePoint business process functionality such as alerts and workflow can be applied to an item when it has been created or edited
- Information can be targeted to users with the use of views
- There is one version of the truth of the information
There is nothing wrong with using Excel for database-storing activity, but a SharePoint list provides a richer user experience in terms of entering, managing, and taking actions from the data.
Lists in SharePoint are based on list templates, such as calendars, contact lists, picture libraries, and others that define the scheme for new lists. You can create multiple lists, based on a single list template.
The following advanced list features are beyond the scope of this book and are provided simply to enhance your knowledge and awareness of SharePoint's functionalities. These include Editing Lists, Customizing List Forms using InfoPath 2010, Customization of List Views in SharePoint Designer, and creating custom Forms.